The Languages of the Pacific 
By J. MAcMILLAN Brown 
One of the fallacies that dog the science of language is that 
‘there are three types of language, isolating, agglutinative and 
inflectional, separated strictly from one another. It was one of 
the too early generalisations of Max Miiller who, coming from 
Germany with a knowledge of Sanskrit, ruled with absolute author- 
ity the science of philology in the English speaking world during 
the latter part of the nineteenth century. This theory together 
with the idea that all classical myths have a philological origin, is 
now discounted. It is found that almost all languages have some 
trace or relic of each type. 
The Chinese is taken as the typical instance of the isolating 
language; each word may be used in various grammatical relations 
without any formal element to indicate these relations. But modern 
English has become practically an isolating language with only 
particles to indicate these relationships and a few relics in the 
pronouns of the old inflectional system. Polynesian is on the same 
footing; a word may be a noun, a verb or an adjective without any 
distinctive formal mark; and particles indicate the relationship, 
whilst in the pronouns, as in English, there remains a few relics 
of inflection. The Japanese is the Pacific Ocean language that best 
illustrates the agglutinating type. The formal elements retain so 
much of their original independence that adverbs and_ honorific 
words may be thrust in between them and the words they pilot 
grammatically. But the language has much that may be said to be 
inflectional and has some trace of the isolating. English, likewise, 
shows a tendency to the agglutinative in, for example, the frequent 
separation of the formal to of the infinitive by an adverb, or even a 
phrase, from the verb. So in Polynesian the ia, a, that added to the 
verb makes the passive, shows in some groups a tendency to assert 
*Tecture delivered before The Hawaiian Historical Society September 5, 1918. 
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